Biology and Environmental Studies
We offer Biology fieldwork at Primary, Secondary and Tertiary level. All courses can be tailored to your requirements. The field centre is within easy walking distance of the River Lym, rockyshore, local woodland and is situated in 14 acres of grassland with wooded areas. The centre is within driving distance of Studland; an excellent example of sand dune succession.
Primary
We can carry out studies of freshwater, rockyshore and woodland habitats looking at food chains, adaptations, lifecycles and pollution. This can be combined with geography coast, river and tourism studies or our activities programme including forest school style activities.
GCSE, AS Level and A-Level
We can tailor a course to meet your requirements to include any of the following:-
Ecological methods: Carry out a range of different sampling techniques including how to choose an appropriate sized quadrat, abundance scale and method of sampling.
Rockyshore Ecology: Investigate zonation of organisms on the rocky shore at Broad Ledge, looking at adaptations, competition, niche, sampling techniques and profiling the shore.
Stream Ecology: Investigate how the invertebrate community is affected by abiotic and biotic factors in the River Lym including the effect of pollution.
Psammoseral succession at Studland: Use standard field ecology techniques to investigate the sand dune succession sequence at Knoll Beach, Studland. We can look at changes in species diversity and relate this to abiotic factors.
Habitats: Study food webs and pyramids of numbers and biomass in the deciduous woodland and meadow habitats here at Woodberry Down and on the rocky shore at Broad Ledge.
Investigation work: We cover planning, implementation, recording and data handling, interpretation and evaluation skills based on either the rockyshore or freshwater ecosystem. This includes simple statistical tests such as Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, chi- squared test, Mann Whitney U and the t-test.
Session summaries to download 
Rocky shore ecology